204w ago - Today Sony's Senior Director of Corporate Communications & Social Media Patrick Seybold has made available another PlayStation Network security update to clarify some common PSN concerns, as follows:

On Tuesday, April 26 we shared that some information that was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network. Once again, we'd like to apologize to the many users who were inconvenienced and worried abut this situation.

We want to state this again given the increase in speculation about credit card information being used fraudulently. One report indicated that a group tried to sell millions of credit card numbers back to Sony. To my knowledge there is no truth to this report of a list, or that Sony was offered an opportunity to purchase the list.

One other point to clarify is from this weekend's press conference. While the passwords that were stored were not "encrypted," they were transformed using a cryptographic hash function. There is a difference between these two types of security measures which is why we said the passwords had not been encrypted. But I want to be very clear that the passwords were not stored in our database in cleartext form. For a description of the difference between encryption and hashing, follow this link.

To reiterate a few other security measures for your information: Sony will not contact you in any way, including by email, asking for your credit card number, social security number or other personally identifiable information. If you are asked for this information, you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking.

When the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that you log on and change your password. Additionally, if you use your PlayStation Network or Qriocity user name or password for other unrelated services or accounts, we strongly recommend that you change them, as well. To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, we encourage you to remain vigilant, to review your account statements and to monitor your credit reports.

We continue to work with law enforcement and forensic experts to identify the criminals behind the attack. Once again, we apologize for causing users concern over this matter.

Our objective is to increase security so our customers can safely and confidently play games and use our network and media services. We will continue to provide updates as we have them.

Sony has also suspended another of its online gaming systems, following the recent PlayStation Network hack. The company took the Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) service offline as part of its wider investigation into security breaches. Multiplayer games including DC Universe and Facebook-based Fortune League were unavailable as a result.

Sony admitted last week that the personal details of 77m PlayStation users may have been stolen by hackers. The suspension of SOE was announced in brief statement on its website, PlayStation.com.

To quote from the BBC: We have had to take the SOE service down temporarily. In the course of our investigation into the intrusion into our systems we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern for us to take the service down effective immediately. We will provide an update later today (Monday), it said.

Last week, Sony said that it did not believe SOE users had been affected by the PlayStation Network hack.

A community relations spokesperson wrote on one of Sony's support forums at the time: We have been conducting a thorough investigation and, to the best of our knowledge, no customer personal information got out to any unauthorized person or persons.

We are continuing that investigation and monitoring the situation carefully; should the situation change, we will - of course - promptly notify you.

Sony Online Entertainment designs and publishes online multiplayer games for the PC, PlayStation 3 and, in the case of Fortune League, Facebook.